Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/Spiritual Value

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MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

The figure of St. Francis elicits in the
modern mind profound veneration and even profounder
incomprehension. Chesterton, in his excellent little sketch of
the saint, discusses the difficulties inherent in trying to
approach or portray this most heroic and confounding of saints
from a modern perspective, and outlines three ways that one might
go about it, two of which he rejects.

The first way, Chesterton says, is to portray Francis as "a
figure in secular history and a model of secular virtues,"
ignoring or downplaying his uncompromisingly ascetical and
authoritarian religious practice and beliefs. This approach, says
Chesterton, is characteristic of many of Francis’s areligious
admirers (e.g., Matthew Arnold), and is comparable to trying to
write the life of Nansen while omitting the North Pole.

Chesterton’s second way is to go to the "opposite extreme" of
focusing on Francis’s religion in a "defiantly devotional" way,
with all the "theological enthusiasm" of the first Franciscans.
The trouble here, of course, is that such an approach would be
impenetrable and unmoving to most audiences today. (Chesterton
gives no example of this extreme, but one may see something like
it in Leonardo Difilippis’s recent Thérèse.)

The third way, the one that Chesterton attempted, is to "put
himself in the position of the ordinary modern outsider and
enquirer," one who finds the real Francis at once admirable and
incomprehensible, and to begin with what is admirable and go on
to try to better understand the incomprehensible.

It is something of a puzzlement that Liliana Cavani’s
Francesco takes none of these approaches, or rather that
her approach combines the drawbacks of each of Chesterton’s ways
and the virtues of none of them, rendering him in the end neither
attractive nor comprehensible, neither particularly joyful nor
particularly self-accusatory, neither besotted by nature nor
enamored of God. There are a few familiar themes: Francis’
concern for the poor and lepers, for example. But there’s no
sense of a compelling personality uniting the various facets of
the Franciscan mystery into a new and dazzling approach to life
and faith.

Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that Cavani
cuts the Gordian knot of how to portray Francis by not portraying
him at all, instead telling the story of another man of the same
name whose life bears some curious parallels with the Francis of
history and hagiography, but whose character, disposition, and
deportment are wholly unrecognizable, either as a portrait of St.
Francis, or of anyone else we have ever heard or known, or
would ever wish to know. In this Cavani’s film perhaps warrants
comparison to an almost contemporary film of far greater
notoriety about an infinitely more important spiritual figure:
Scorsese’s The
Last Temptation of Christ, released the year prior to
Francesco.

The reason this is a puzzlement is that Cavani’s interest in
the saint appears to be more than passing. Francesco is
her second film devoted to the Poverello of Assisi, following her
1966 film Francesco d’Assisi. Both films were scripted by
Cavani herself, each time in collaboration with another writer.
(Francesco is widely reported to be based on a Hermann
Hesse novel, but the film’s credits make no mention of Hesse, and
I have so far been unable to confirm that Hesse ever wrote a
novel about Francis. Hesse did devote a number of essays to the
saint, and the protagonist of one of his novels, Peter
Camenzind, is inspired to try to live like St. Francis,
possibly with results as uneven as the protagonist of Cavani’s
film.)

How is it, then, that Cavani succeeds in making Francesco
neither an attractive hero of secular virtues nor an off-putting
champion of spiritual ones? How does she come to make her
protagonist off-putting without being otherworldly, earthbound
without being attractive?

By what mysterious process has this vibrant human firebrand,
this unpredictable, leaping, shouting zealot, been transformed
into the sheepish, subdued, self-deprecating cipher we see here
played by sighing, shyly grinning Mickey Rourke? What creative
miscalculation resulted in a portrait of this most eloquent and
flamboyant poet of both the natural and supernatural orders that
makes him so tongue-tied and diffident about both?

Even if we throw the history and hagiography of St. Francis to
the winds and consider Cavani’s creation as sui generis,
why does her study offer neither psychological insight nor
religious inspiration, neither period authenticity nor modern
relevance? What would possess anyone to make two films about a
character who is ultimately, fatally, not that interesting, not
worth spending two hours with?

Take the famous episode in which Francis, hauled by his
outraged father Pietro Bernardone (Paolo Bonacelli) before the
local bishop over the saint’s dispensing of his father’s goods to
the poor, strips the clothes off his back and hands them to his
stunned father in token of his renunciation of all claim upon and
debt to the man who sired him. As played by Rourke under Cavani’s
direction, with his clothes (and then the bishop’s cloak)
self-consciously clutched over his barely-concealed crotch before
the laughing crowd, this breathtakingly dramatic gesture carries
all the impact and drama of a mortified grade-school boy taking a
dare to pull down his pants in front of the girls. (The sympathy
with which Bernardone appeals to his son to return home, assuring
him his indiscretions are forgotten, is only one more curious
twist. Later, Bernardone sends a message to Francesco listing all
the goods he will give to the poor if only Francesco will return
home, thus offering to ransom him a second time!)

Then there’s the episode in which Francis rolls naked in the
snow (the film is full of male nudity, in itself not out of
keeping with the record of Francis’s life, though it’s seldom
portrayed with the spirit of freedom and innocence suggested in
traditional accounts). As the story is traditionally told,
Francis rolls in the snow in response to a suggestion from the
devil that he might marry and have children, even mocking the
devil by making piles of snow to represent his "wife" and
"children." This display, we are told, put the devil to flight,
and Francis was victorious over temptation.

In the film, this event is completely transmogrified into a
bizarrely lewd scene that almost suggests that rolling in the
snow was itself the subject of the temptation, not the means of
fighting it. The episode lacks any setup indicating that Francis
was being tempted prior to his stripping and leaping into the
snow, and his moans as he packs snow over his crotch seem
deliberately ambiguous.

The impression that Cavani’s protagonist is actually
copulating with the snow is enhanced by the explanation he offers
to a pair of approaching brothers: Gesturing to the pillars he
has made in the snow, he says, "This one is my wife. That little
one is my son. I have been tempted. Forgive me." Instead of
triumphing over temptation by abusing his flesh, Francis asks
forgiveness for apparently yielding to temptation to commit
self-abuse. (Here especially the similarities to Last
Temptation are evident.)

Critics of the film have often cited the casting of tough-guy
Rourke as a fatal miscalculation, while proponents have
ambitiously tried to find value in the unconventional casting,
arguing that sainthood is available to all, and therefore anyone
can be a saint. The problems with Roarke, however, begin not with
his edgy, tattooed image, but with his beefy, muscular body type,
so glaringly unlike the familiar slight frame of the historical
Francis. (Italian actor Paco Reconti, who plays Brother Rufino,
would have been a far more apt choice than Rourke for the lead.)
I’m also unsure why neither Francesco nor any of his followers
are tonsured, nor why Chiara (or Claire, played by Helena Bonham
Carter) goes bareheaded for most of the film instead of wearing
the black veil, looking indistinguishable from the friars, not to
mention acting and being treated as one of them. (For a more
characteristically Franciscan portrayal of Clair’s special status
among Francis’s followers, and of everything else, see
Rossellini’s excellent The
Flowers of St. Francis.)

Hardly a single episode hasn’t been strangely reinterpreted in
some way. Francesco’s conversion is now depicted as the result of
encountering a contraband vernacular translation of the gospels,
dragging the old red herring about the Church’s supposed
opposition to such translations into a story that has never, so
far as I know, been so afflicted. (In fact, Francis did find
early inspiration in a book of the gospels — but it was the
Gospel book on the altar at the church of St. Nicholas in Assisi.
Quite possibly it was chained there for safekeeping, a medieval
practice that is the subject of another anti-Catholic red
herring.)

Toward the end of this bizarre curiosity of a film is a
particularly bizarre scene in which Francesco and Brother Leo
(Fabio Bussotti) bring a written version of the rule for
Francesco’s order to Pope Innocent III, who has previously
approved an oral version of the rule. The pope, they are told,
has died the day before. In fact, they discover the pope not only
dead but lying on the floor beside a bier, white and stiff as a
department-store mannequin, one clawlike white hand raised over
his chest.

Why is the pope’s corpse lying on the floor? Who knows? The
film has established that the pope’s death was already known, so
it’s not like Francesco and Leo were the ones to discover him.
Who would leave a dead pope lying on the floor? Perhaps he fell
off the bier somehow?

At any rate, Francesco and Leo pick up the corpse and place it
on the bier. Then Francesco whispers something in the corpse’s
ear and instructs Leo to give the written rule to the dead pope.
"Do you think just because he’s dead, he can’t read?" Francesco
asks. If I had been in Leo’s place, I would have replied, "Maybe
he can, but he why should he need me to give it to him? And even
if he does read it, he can’t very well approve it now anyway, can
he?"

Is this meant as history? Theology? Psychological character
development? Poetic symbolism? Who knows? Perhaps the film makes
more sense at its original 150-minute running length (the U.S.
DVD version I’ve seen has been edited to only 119 minutes),
though I can’t imagine any conceivable additions that would save
the film from being a disaster.

Passing comparisons to The Last Temptation of Christ
notwithstanding, Cavani’s film hasn’t attracted a great deal of
attention, and the length at which it has here been considered is
wholly disproportionate to its significance. The reason for this
level of attention is that Francesco is one of the fifteen
films named on the 1995
Vatican film list in the category of "Religion."

As a point of reference regarding reasonable and well-informed
Catholic opinion with respect to world cinema, the Vatican film
list is an excellent resource, but it is neither infallible nor
even authoritative. Opinions may legitimately differ in such
matters, but reasonable and well-informed Catholic opinion may
well regard the inclusion of Francesco as the most glaring
sign of the list’s fallibility.